There's a test that tells you more about a business than its accounts do. Could the owner leave for a fortnight, phone off, and come back to find it standing? Not limping. Standing.

Some of you have been reading long enough to remember when I failed it. 2013, South Manchester, a veg box business. My co-founder did the deliveries, a friend helped with the marketing, volunteers packed the boxes, and everything else lived in my head: the ordering, the office, the socials, alongside a paid job, a degree and teaching kung fu in the evenings. I couldn't take a weekend. Not wouldn't. Couldn't. If I went to see friends I spent the whole time worrying, then came back on Monday further behind than when I left, which is a strange reward for resting.

What fixed it wasn't effort. It was a book called Getting Things Done, and the odd discipline of writing myself a handover as if the man coming back on Monday were someone else. Once every open loop had a home outside my head, I could leave. The business was tiny. The lesson wasn't: a pile only forms where decisions have no home. It's also where the coaching some of you first came to me for started. The discipline scaled: one man's head first, then, from 2015, whole businesses.

There's a version of the test you can run this week without booking anything. For forty-eight hours, don't answer, don't approve, don't be the one who knows where the thing is. Then count what waited for you. Every item in that pile is a decision whose only home is your head, and the pile is why the fortnight feels impossible.

Run the forty-eight hours. Reply and tell me what waited, whether it's three things or thirty. I read every reply, and I'll tell you what I'd fix first.

David
David Schofield · Purpose In Action